Weekend Links: The Art of Persuasion and More

The Leader

RITHOLTZ: Let me give you a quote from the book which I find fascinating, “We all fool ourselves from time to time in order to keep our thoughts and beliefs consistent with what we have already done.” Why is the desire for consistency such a motivator of behavior?

CIALDINI: Two reasons one is we prefer to have our — for reasons of self concept to be consistent within ourselves, right? We want to see ourselves as reasonable, as logical, and rational individuals would be — would say one thing that would fit with the next thing we say, the other is the people around us want us to be consistent too.

And so for both of those reasons, internal status and external status, we want to be consistent and appear to be consistent in our environment.

Even worse than wasting your own time is wasting the time of others. Drucker reminds us that leaders can be their own organizations’ worst bottlenecks. “In a knowledge organization, if something sits in the leader’s in-box for two weeks, it’s like the line being down in a factory for two weeks,” says Wartzman. “No one would tolerate that.”

The first surprise: Whether a manager spends 36% or 9% of her time on employee development doesn’t seem to matter. “There is very little correlation between time spent coaching and employee performance,” says Jaime Roca, one of Gartner’s practice leaders for human resources. “It’s less about the quantity and more about the quality.”

Her mother-in-law once advised her that the key to a happy marriage was sometimes pretending to be a little deaf; Ruth has said the same applies to being a female Supreme Court justice. “When a thoughtless or unkind word is spoken, best to tune it out,” she observed. “Reacting in anger or annoyance will not advance one’s ability to persuade.”

nationalgeographic.com

Health and Fitness

That’s great news. Even better is that it doesn’t take much. The study’s main conclusion is that even one session or less than an hour a week of resistance training reduced the risk of cardiac events and death from all causes during the study, no matter how much (or how little) aerobic exercise the subjects were also doing.

“We have known from some small, not well controlled studies that the microbiome does change — and we have known for many years that adopting a Western lifestyle is associated with an increase in disease,” said microbial ecosystem expert Jack Gilbert, director of the University of Chicago’s Microbiome Center, who was not involved with the current study. “This brings those two concepts together.”

Washington Post

The Art of Coaching

In response, a new management team under Graham Henry began to rebuild the world’s most successful sporting team from the inside out. They wanted a fresh culture that placed emphasis on individual character and personal leadership. Their mantra? ‘Better People Make Better All Blacks’. The result? An incredible win-rate of just over 86pc, and a Rugby World Cup.

In his 15 seasons as an NBA player, Kerr played for elite coaches such as Cotton Fitzsimmons (832 career wins), Lenny Wilkens (1,332 wins), Phil Jackson (1,155 wins) and Gregg Popovich (1,022 wins). So he knows how great coaches operate. Part of what he has learned is the importance of perspective: Maintaining a sense of humor and playfulness by showing your team that, indeed, there is more to life than basketball.

BOOKS

(The Coaching Conversation is an amazon affiliate. Every time you purchase through here you support this blog. We thank you for doing so. Of course, we also think the public library and your local independent bookstore are good choices as well.)